SC - shortbread/-cakes & salad

[Philip & Susan Troy]

david friedman wrote:
> 
> At 11:50 AM +0200 9/3/00, Cindy M. Renfrow wrote:
> 
> >To make fine Cakes. Take a quantity of fine wheate Flower, and put it in an
> >earthen pot. Stop it close and set it in an Oven, and bake it as long as
> >you would a Pasty of Venison, and when it is baked it will be full of
> >clods. Then searce your flower through a fine sercer. Then take clouted
> >Creame or sweet butter, but Creame is best: then take sugar, cloves, Mace,
> >saffron and yolks of eggs, so much as wil seeme to season your flower.
> 
<snip>
> >        To every 3 cups of sifted baked flour, take the following:
> >        1 1/2 cups butter
> >        1 cup sugar
<snip>
> Compare the description of sugar in the original--listed along with
> cloves, mace, saffron, ...--with its role in your worked out recipe,
> where it is one of the main ingredients. I have no way of being sure,
> but my suspicion is that your quantities reflect the fact that you
> already know how shortbread is made, and are interpreting this recipe
> as something similar. Have you tried doing it with a tablespoon or so
> of sugar and seeing how it comes out?

Am I right in recalling that the original for the fine cakes recipe is
late 16th century, roughly 1560 to 1590 C.E.? A very brief look through
some cookbooks, the ones I can reach, anyway (it's a long story) looking
for recipes for small cakes, turns up, among other sources, Gervase
Markham. Yes, he is later, but by how much is unclear. It's been
theorized that the material Markham published in 1615 may be somewhat
older; he was actually sued for plagiarizing his _own_ work by
publishers who felt he was recycling old books as new. Anyway, Markham
has a few recipes for small cakes, and excluding those that give no
quantities or proportions, and also those that contain gobs of sweet
dried fruit, the remainder, consisting basically of ingredients similar
to those in the above recipe, seem to call for a lot of sugar, maybe
equal parts sugar and flour. (Cindy's adaptation has roughly half as
much sugar as flour.) 

Of course, Markham _is_ a later source, and he has no exactly parallel
recipe, but the increase in sugar availability and the decrease in its
price does seem to follow the introduction of Cyprian sugar in what, the
late 15th, early 16th century?  

> I'm not very familiar with the 16th century sources--does anyone know
> of a recipe in this same family that has enough information about
> quantities to tellus whether Cindy's guess or mine is right about the
> quantity of sugar? My view may in part be biased by the fact that I
> am more familiar with the earlier period cuisine--at which point
> sugar was expensive and treated more like a spice than a staple.

Medieval sources do show an increase in sugar use over time. Recipes
from the early fourteenth century, calling for honey, sometimes call for
equal parts honey and sugar in the late fourteenth century and early
fifteenth century, and later still there are recipes that are still
medieval (and clearly related to earlier forebears) calling for sugar only.

An alternate proposal: is it possible you are seeing, also based on some
modern experience, the ingredients as being listed in decreasing
quantities? Just wondering, I'm not arguing in favor of this being a
hugely sweet dish, just in favor of accepting the possibility that it
_could_ be, based on reasonably near contemporary recipes.

Another thought that occurs to me is that the sugar could be listed with
the spices because it had to be ground or grated, and it would make
sense to do all of this at once.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com